Block Little Snitch 4

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Sep 08, 2017  The Internet is a terrifying place, and Objective Development’s Little Snitch 4 ($45) has tried for many years to help keep your Mac locked down.

  1. How to block Little Snitch from calling home and killing numbers:
  2. 1. The first step is to block Little Snitch with Little Snitch. Create two new rules in Little Snitch as below:
  3. a) Deny connections to Server Hostname http://www.obdev.at in LS Configuration. The address that will appear if you do it correctly is 80.237.144.65. Save.
  4. and the next is:
  5. b) Deny connections in LS Config to the application Little Snitch UIAgent (navigate to /Library/Little Snitch/Little Snitch UIAgent.app, any server, any port.
  6. 2. After that is done, open the Terminal (in your Utilities) and paste in:
  7. sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts
  8. (Hit return and type in your admin password). A TextEdit window will open behind the Terminal window. Command+Tab to it - this is your hosts file.
  9. 3. Place your cursor at the end of the text there, type or leave one vertical space and paste in the following:
  10. # Block Little Snitch
  11. 4. Close TextEdit, hit Command+Tab to return to the Terminal window, and paste in the following:
  12. sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
  13. 5. Hit the Return key and quit Terminal. You're finished now.
  14. 6. Easy, isn't it. If only everyone would do this, the developer would cease and desist from killing the number that you personally are using successfully on your Mac. At least until the next version is released…
LS4 has had a few private betas up until now, but it's in public beta at this point and some of the new stuff they've been working on is pretty interesting. Their main landing page has been updated for LS4 [1] and has a nice general summary of new features with screenshots, but trying to submit that link just goes back to the HN discussion on LS3 five months back [2]. The What's New is more detailed. I'm particularly curious how their improved Research Assistant 2.0 will turn out. They're making an effort to open it up and turn LS4 into a bit more of a platform, allowing 3rd party devs to make specific descriptive information available:

>Third party developers can now bundle their apps with an Internet Access Policy file containing descriptions of all network connections that are possibly triggered by their app. Little Snitch will then display that information to users, helping them in their decision how to handle a particular connection. A description of the policy file format will be provided soon.

Research Assistant is a useful feature and at first blush this seems to have the potential to make it even better, assuming LS has enough market penetration to actually get more then a handful of devs to provide a description. The spirit of transparency is a good one too. One thing I wonder about though is how well they're prepared to deal with lying, because this seems like it could possibly open up a potential risk for social engineering. Can the developer of an application making a connection a power user would consider worth blocking actually be trusted provide their own description? If they do lie (directly or by omission) or even simply obfuscate about what it's doing, is Obdev up to policing that?

Having used it since version one though I'm excited about a lot of the new changes. I hope OpenSnitch and similar projects are inspired and vice versa.

Snitch

Little Snitch 4.4.3

1: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Little Snitch Reviews

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858